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Introduction to the Special Issue onViolence, Elections, and Party PoliticsMary Beth Altier a , Susanne Martin b & Leonard B. Weinberg ba International Center for the Study of Terrorism, The PennsylvaniaState University, University Park, Pennsylvania, USAb Department of Political Science, University of Nevada, Reno, Reno,Nevada, USAVersion of record first published: 07 Dec 2012.
To cite this article: Mary Beth Altier , Susanne Martin & Leonard B. Weinberg (2013): Introduction tothe Special Issue on Violence, Elections, and Party Politics, Terrorism and Political Violence, 25:1, 1-7
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Introduction to the Special Issue on Violence,Elections, and Party Politics
MARY BETH ALTIER
International Center for the Study of Terrorism, The Pennsylvania StateUniversity, University Park, Pennsylvania, USA
SUSANNE MARTIN AND LEONARD B. WEINBERG
Department of Political Science, University of Nevada, Reno, Reno,Nevada, USA
At a White House banquet held in his honor in March 1954, Winston Churchillobserved that it was better to ‘‘jaw-jaw’’ than ‘‘war-war.’’ In the Cold War atmos-phere of the time (Stalin had died the previous year), Churchill was maintaining thattalking with the Soviet leadership was better than a nuclear confrontation betweenthe two superpowers. Who would argue otherwise?
Yet by treating talking and warring as opposites Churchill unintentionally callsour attention to a subject on which we intend to focus in this introduction. Surelyfew would deny that political parties, especially in the democratic world, are institu-tions that specialize in talking, just as armies specialize in warring. For parties, wordsare weapons. Political parties, their candidates for office—and elected representativesusually devote themselves to persuading others—rhetoric in other words—aboutthe superiority of their preferences and candidates over those of their opponents.Violence belongs to another realm. But is this really true?
Churchill’s own career suggests otherwise. After all, he combined great skill as aspeech-maker and party politician with his role as a war-time leader during Britain’smoment of extreme threat from Nazi Germany. As with Churchill, so too with polit-ical parties; they too can combine careers of jawing and warring. Of course we mightdefine the term ‘‘political party’’ in such a way as to preclude its involvement inviolent operations. Its peacefulness would then be true, but true by definition. Ifwe follow this sleight-of-hand technique we would have to deny that the Liberalsand Conservatives who waged a civil war in Colombia from 1947 to the early1960s—a conflict in which thousands lost their lives—were in fact political parties.Nor could we consider the German Social Democrats, Communists, and Nazis duringthe Weimar Republic as political parties since they each had their own highly violent
Mary Beth Altier is a postdoctoral fellow at the International Center for the Study ofTerrorism at The Pennsylvania State University. Susanne Martin is an assistant professor inthe Department of Political Science, University of Nevada, Reno. Leonard B. Weinberg isthe Foundation Professor of Political Science Emeritus at the University of Nevada, Reno.
Address correspondence to Leonard B. Weinberg, Department of Political Science (0302),University of Nevada, Reno, 1664 N. Virginia Street, Reno, NV 89557-0302, USA. E-mail:[email protected]
Terrorism and Political Violence, 25:1–7, 2013Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLCISSN: 0954-6553 print=1556-1836 onlineDOI: 10.1080/09546553.2013.733241
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paramilitary organizations. We prefer instead to define ‘‘political party’’ as AlanWare does: ‘‘. . . as an institution that a) seeks to influence a state, often by attemptingto occupy positions in government, and b) usually consists of more than a singleinterest in society and so, to some degree, attempts to ‘aggregate’ interests.’’1
Ware’s definition avoids various Anglo-American and postwar West Europeandemocratic biases. There is no requirement in his definition that parties need bepeaceful institutions or confine their activities to pursuit of public office at competi-tive elections and then occupy positions of power and influence based on the out-comes of these contests.
Types of Political Violence
If we accept the idea that political parties may engage in violence, what types ofviolence are likely to be most prevalent? At first glance, we would be inclined toconfine our observations to internal manifestations. Conflicts beyond the territorialconfines within which parties normally operate would normally be beyond theirken. Perhaps, but this judgment seems premature. In some circumstances, partiesdo appear to become involved in international and transnational fighting. Forinstance, Hezbollah, the Lebanese party whose members serve in Lebanon’s cabinetand parliament, became embroiled in an international war with Israel (2006), oneinvolving aerial bombardments of each entity’s territory.
More common though is foreign political party involvement in civil wars. Duringthe Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), members of French and Italian Socialist partiesalong with Communists and Trotskyites from various countries became embroiled inthe unsuccessful struggle to maintain the Spanish Republic against Franco’s insur-gency. In these cases, ideological affinity and tactical advantage appear to be majorconsiderations. Political parties whose interests might be advanced or threatenedby the outcome of a civil war, particularly ones occurring in adjacent countries, wouldhave an incentive to intervene. The same observation would appear to apply ininstances where an ethnically-based party in one country sees its co-ethnics in anotherembroiled in a civil war.
Likewise, political party organizations are hardly above the use of terrorism onforeign soil. For example, members of Ustacha, a Croat party pursuing independencefrom what was then Yugoslavia, managed to assassinate the French foreign ministerBarthou along with the Yugoslav King Alexander in Marseilles (1934) while the latterwas on a state visit.2 In the Palestinian territories on theWest Bank andGaza Strip bothFatah and Hamas act like political parties in that they compete at elections in pursuitof public office. Yet both organizations have ‘‘military wings,’’ the Al Aqsa MartyrsBrigade and the Qassam Brigades, which have waged terrorist campaigns inside Israel.3
The likelihood though is that most parties most of the time limit their violence tothe domestic scene. We think then it makes sense to adapt Ted Gurr’s well-knowncategories of civil strife in examining the roles of political parties in participating,either as perpetrators or victims, in internal violence.4 For Gurr these categoriesare based on the numbers of people who become involved in the violence and thedegree of planning in which its leaders engage. Given these two criteria, Gurr thenproduces the following forms of civil strife.
a. Turmoil: relatively spontaneous acts of violence involving large numbers ofparticipants such as riots and mass protests
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b. Conspiracy: well-planned acts of relatively small-scale violence such as coupsd’etat or minor guerrilla and terrorist campaigns
c. Internal War: widespread violence involving both large numbers of participantsand a high level of planning5
We would modify these forms by distinguishing among the elements in Gurr’ssecond category. We would distinguish between the coup d’etat, a situation in whichthe coup makers need to be close to the centers of power, e.g., high-ranking militaryofficers, and guerrilla and terrorist campaigns where the insurgent leadership isalmost always distant from these centers.
Clearly not all types of political parties are equally likely to engage in civil strife.Parties that develop special organizations, underground cells, and paramilitary orga-nizations for purposes of fighting opponents and the authorities seem the mostlikely.6 Fascist, neo-fascist, and far-left parties including Marxist-Leninist, Maoist,and Trotskyite represent the strongest contenders. Typically these are anti-systemparties which do not regard the current regime as legitimate. In fact, as Juan Linzhas noted, democratic countries in which political parties develop fighting capabili-ties are often on the verge of breakdown.7 Armed parties, as in Weimar Germany,serve as both cause and effect of declining commitments to democratic practices.Second, armed parties are often structured to engage in underground operationsin the event of a government crackdown. Third, they characteristically have a ‘‘youthbulge.’’ These parties typically attract large numbers of young people looking forexcitement and adventure who come to define themselves as defenders of a politicalfaith (national socialism, Peronism, Castroism, national liberation) or beleagueredethnic community.8
Although our attention is naturally drawn to the political fringes, pro-systemparties may also conduct campaigns of violence. Parties in government though,particularly ones with close ties to the military, may carry out surreptitious terroristcampaigns against forces challenging the status quo. For instance, in El Salvadorduring the 1980s, the leader of the National Republican Alliance (the ARENAparty) had his ‘‘death squad’’ followers carry out assassinations of land reformers,labor union leaders, human rights activists, and priests (including the archbishopof San Salvador) he had labeled ‘‘Communists.’’9 Zimbabwe under Robert Mugabeand the Ivory Coast under the leadership of Laurent Bbagbo offer other examples.Practices such as these are hardly unknown elsewhere.
Some types of political party systems also appear especially vulnerable to episodesof internal violence. Polarized systems where the dominant pressure in the system is‘‘centripetal’’ seem particularly susceptible.10 Let us explain what we mean. Collec-tions of political parties where the center is dominated by one or a few large partiesand where parties at each end of the ideological spectrum have little or no chanceof achieving a share in power via the ballot box may very well have incentives toemploy violence as a means of prying their way into a share of political power or dis-playing their displeasure with those possessing it. What do these parties have to lose?
New or newly restored competitive party systems are also vulnerable to episodesof civil strife. These are typically situations where the ‘‘rules of the game’’ areunclear, where party political contestants are suspicious of one another or the newregime that now permits them to vie for power at elections. Portugal in 1976, follow-ing the military’s overthrow of the Martino dictatorship, and the Philippines afterFerdinand Marcos was forced out in 1986 were countries where some of the new
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or newly resurrected parties employed violence along with election campaigning as ameans to test the system’s tolerance for dissent.
In addition, certain political conditions represent risk factors for political partyviolence. Election campaigns seem among the most obvious.11 Not uncommonlycampaigns have a polarizing effect on the electorate. (Even the term ‘‘campaign’’ itselfconveys a military connotation.) Candidates and parties usually seek to distinguishthemselves from their rivals. In countries where the competing parties represent dif-ferent religions or ethnicities as in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, candidatesmay see the advantages in stirring up animosities even though these often lead to riots,killings, and inter-communal rampages.
Not only election campaigns but election days themselves may offer occasionsfor inter-party violence. Turnout may be reduced when voters are warned by oneparty or another that their appearance at the polls will be dangerous, especially ifthey are led to believe that commitments to the ‘‘wrong’’ party or candidate(s) willbe followed by murder and mayhem. Multiple elections in Iraq, for example, haveserved as occasions for suicide bombings at or near the polling stations as a meansby which Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia and other terrorist groups hope to scare offvoters committed to one of the Shiite parties.
Further, the emotions aroused by election campaigns may not be cooled follow-ing the balloting. Losing parties and candidates may declare they were cheated. Thevotes, in one way or another, were not counted fairly. And the miscounting was donedeliberately. The results of these assertions are often intended to deny legitimacy tothe apparent winners. Under these circumstances the voters for the losing side(s)may be brought into the streets and then engage in waves of demonstrations and riotsto press their claims. The inter-tribal violence that followed the 2007 national electionsin Kenya might serve as an example. The massive street protests in Iranian cities fol-lowing the ‘‘re-election’’ of President Ahmadinejad in 2009 provides another example.
Political scientists have come to regard mainstream political parties as indispens-able instruments of democratic governance. By contrast they have paid little attentionto the destructive and violent roles of parties in weakening democracy. This despitethe fact that America’s much venerated 18th century founders warned of the dangerof faction—in the context of what was, after all, a new democracy.
Similarly, since the events of 9=11 social scientists have produced a substantialbody of work on Al Qaeda, the components of its network, and terrorism more gen-erally. With a few exceptions, little of this work has been devoted to the relation-ship(s) between terrorism, elections, and party politics. (The exceptions wouldinclude the 2004 Spanish elections following the Madrid commuter train bombingsand the emergence of the Armed Islamic Group in Algeria following the govern-ment’s cancellation of the 1993 parliamentary elections.)
What Follows
Our purpose in assembling the articles included in this special issue of Terrorism andPolitical Violence is to focus attention on the linkages between party politics, competi-tive elections, and violence. The seven articles following these introductory commentsinvestigate the links between parties, elections, and violence, including and especiallyterrorism. The essays come in two forms: the general and the country-specific studies.
In ‘‘Do Terrorist Attacks Increase Closer to Elections?,’’ Lindsay ShorrNewman investigates the relationship between the incidence of terrorist attacks
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and the proximity of national elections. With some qualifications she reports thisgeneralization: the closer to the balloting, the more frequent the terrorist attacks.This is especially true in the case of authoritarian regimes.
The contributions by Nil S. Satana, Molly Inman, and Johanna Kristın Birnir(‘‘Religion, Government Coalitions, and Terrorism’’) and Robert Brathwaite (‘‘TheElectoral Terrorist: Terror Groups and Democratic Participation’’) explore the gen-eral links between terrorist groups and electoral participation and between religiouslyinspired political parties and the incidence of political violence. Satana, Inman, andBirnir stress that when excluded from the political process, political parties thatappeal to the electorate on the basis of religious views are more likely to stimulateviolence than parties based on secular appeals. Brathwaite’s focus is on territorialityand the nature of group competition. He answers this question: ‘‘Why do some ter-rorist groups choose to participate in elections while others do not?’’ His answer isthat groups seeking to advance some territorial cause (e.g., independence for someethnic community) have a coherent constituency to which to appeal, and are thereforefar more likely to enter the electoral process than groups that do not. Brathwaite alsomaintains that competition between terrorist groups may prompt their entrance intothe electoral arena as they seek to differentiate themselves from the competition.
The other contributions to this collection aid our understanding of the tiesamong parties, elections, and violence by paying attention to individual countriesand particular situations. The Palestinian group Hamas is now in the process oftransforming itself into a political party. Crowds of Hamas’ supporters, along withthe organization’s ‘‘holy warriors’’ and ‘‘martyrs,’’ certainly used violence in 2008 towrest control of the Gaza Strip from the Palestinian Authority. Yet in order to retainthis control and expand its power in the West Bank, Hamas has come to resemble apolitical party, a religiously inspired one, but a party nonetheless. Tavishi Bhasinand Maia Carter Hallward (‘‘Hamas as a Political Party: Democratization in thePalestinian Territories’’) track Hamas as it adds the normal repertoire of party polit-ical activity to its martyrdom operations. Has the Hamas leadership reached the con-clusion that terrorism is a dead end? Probably not versus Israel, although it hasoffered the Jewish state a long-term truce or a hudna, but to ensure its base of sup-port within the Palestinian territories Hamas leaders have found it necessary to useconventional forms of political party organization.
In the contributions by Luis de la Calle and Ignacio Sanchez-Cuenca (‘‘Killing andVoting in the Basque Country: An Exploration of the Electoral Link Between ETA andits Political Branch’’) and Rogelio Alonso (‘‘The Madrid Bombings and NegotiationsWith ETA: A Case Study of the Impact of Terrorism on Spanish Politics’’), we confrontEurope’s longest lived terrorist organization, Basque Homeland and Liberty (ETA).Founded in 1959 with the aim of liberating the Basque country of Spain (along withthe French Basque provinces) from the control of the Franco dictatorship, ETA hasundergone a long succession of changes and permutations from its formative years.As one generation of ETAmilitants has passed from the scene another has arisen. Alongthe way ETA has undergone multiple splits between those who support a politicalapproach and those committed tomore armed struggle. de la Calle and Sanchez-Cuencatake a subnational approach and examine the relationship between support for ETA’spolitical party, Herri Batasuna, and the location of ETA attacks within Spain as well asthe impact of different types of ETA attacks on Herri Batasuna’s local vote share.Alonso, on the other hand, traces the effects of the 2004 Madrid bombings by jihadistsand negotiations with ETA on national electoral outcomes.
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Our reason for paying special attention to the Spanish case is twofold. First, in ETAit offers an example of a radical group going through a complete cycle, beginning with itsincubation, followed by the decision to turn to terrorism at a time in which Spain wasundergoing a transition to democracy. This was followed by a decision to participate inparliamentary elections. And now ETA, like the IRA, has finally abandoned the gun infavor of a negotiated settlement with the government in Madrid. Second, the study ofthe 2004 commuter train bombings by Alonso provides a useful illustration about theextent to which a terrorist attack may be used by governments and political parties tomanipulate domestic public opinion, unsuccessfully in this instance.
Finally, Matt Buehler (‘‘Safety-Valve Elections and the Arab Spring: The Weak-ening (and Resurgence) of Morocco’s Islamist Opposition Party’’) shows us howcompetitive elections held under Morocco’s authoritarian regime may be used tocontain Islamist groups and discredit the kingdom’s leading opposition, the Justiceand Development Party (PJD). Some observers might see the relevance of RobertMichels’ classic Political Parties and the ‘‘iron law of oligarchy’’ in this essay.
Michels asserted that, ‘‘Who says organization, says oligarchy.’’12 Writing aboutmilitant and sometimes violent worker movements in Europe at the beginning of the20th century, Michels observed that in striving to achieve their revolutionary goalsthese movements created organizations: political parties and labor unions. Theseorganizations developed a division of labor and a separate leadership group. Overtime the leaders developed interests in conflict with those of the followers. The fol-lowers retained their militancy but the leaders lost theirs, a result of exposure toother perspectives and a desire to retain their status and rank. The leaders becameco-opted by the wider system in which they found themselves.
Buehler’s article really captures this process in motion as the Moroccan eliteattempts to drain the PJD of its Islamist militancy. We cannot help but notice thata similar process may be at work in other cases where a terrorist group forms or trans-forms itself into a political party. For years Fatah, for instance, was led by YassirArafat, who typically carried a gun strapped to his waist and wore a keffiyeh to sym-bolize his commitment to the Palestinian liberation struggle. Now the same organiza-tion changed into a political party, and a ruling one at that, led by figures wearingWestern-style business suits who present themselves as peace-seeking statesmen. Doesthe ‘‘iron law of oligarchy’’ apply to terrorist groups cum political parties too?
Notes
1. Alan Ware, Political Parties and Party Systems (New York: Oxford University Press,1996), 3.
2. See, for example, Walter Laqueur, The Age of Terrorism (Boston: Little, Brown,1987), 98–99.
3. See, for example, Mathew Levitt, Hamas (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006),11–14.
4. Ted Gurr, ‘‘A Comparative Study of Civil Strife,’’ in Hugh Graham and Ted Gurr,eds., The History of Violence in America (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), 572–632.
5. Ted Gurr, ‘‘A Comparative Study of Civil Strife,’’ in Ted Gurr and Hugh Graham,eds., Violence in America (New York: New American Library, 1969), 544–605.
6. On these categories see Maurice Duverger, Political Parties (New York: John Wiley,1954), 1–60.
7. Juan Linz, ‘‘Crisis, Breakdown, and Re-equilibration,’’ in Juan Linz and Alfred Ste-pan, eds., The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1978), 75–96.
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8. For instance, in reviewing the biographies of young Storm Troopers during theWeimar period Peter Merkl was struck by how few of them reported joining because ofanti-Semitism and other elements of the National Socialist program: The Making of a Storm-trooper (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 1980), 26–100. See also Martha Crenshaw,‘‘An Organizational Approach to the Study of Terrorism,’’ Orbis 29, no. 3 (1985): 465–488.
9. Tina Rosenberg, Children of Cain (New York: William Morrow, 1991), 219–270.10. Giovanni Sartori, ‘‘European Political Parties: The Case of Polarized Pluralism,’’ in
Joseph LaPalombara and Myron Weiner, eds., Political Parties and Political Development(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), 137–176; and Arend Lijphart, Democracyin Plural Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 1–24.
11. David Rapoport and Leonard Weinberg, eds., ‘‘Elections and Violence,’’ in TheDemocratic Experience and Political Violence (London: Frank Cass, 2001), 15–47.
12. Robert Michels, Political Parties (New York: Crowell-Collier Publishing Company,1962), 365.
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